Professor Takes On Prominent Family In 'Asper Nation'

Edge's latest book, "Asper Nation,"
has been so popular with Canadians that it has sold out
at Amazon.com and Chapters, a large book chain in Canada.

Marc Edge’s newest book, “Asper Nation,”
which tells the story of “Canada’s Most Dangerous
Media Company,” could be considered a cautionary tale
for Americans.

Edge is an associate professor of journalism at SHSU.

The book, which was published in October, discusses the history
of the media mogul Asper family, the influences the media
has on politics and why the two are a “dangerous”
combination.

A “hot topic” in Canada, there have been two federal
inquiries regarding broadcasting policy and news media there
over the past five years.

The story unfolds over an approximate 10-year period, beginning
when newspaper magnate Conrad Black renounced his Canadian
citizenship in order to accept an appointment to the British
House of Lords and sold his Canadian media holdings to CanWest
Global Communications, a television network owned by the Asper
family.

This sale included 13 major Canadian newspapers, 126 community
newspapers, Internet properties and the National Post, representing
most of the media in western Canada. Its dominant TV station
in Vancouver accounts for 70 percent of the audience share
for the evening news, according to Edge.

“It’s probably the tightest media ownership of
any major metropolitan market in the free world,” he
said.

After the CanWest Global takeover, the conservative Asper
family, which also has personal ties to the Canadian Prime
Minister Jean Chrétien, essentially ordered its newspapers
to “lay off the prime minister” in reference to
a financial scandal involving Chrétien.

“At the end of 2001, the Asper family, CanWest Global
Communications, ordered all of its newspapers across the country
to carry national editorials,” Edge said. “Eventually
this resulted in senate inquiry into the news media in Canada,
and the senate made some mild recommendations, but by that
time, the conservative government had taken over and were
cozy with the new generation of Aspers.

“This is what’s got a lot of people concerned,
myself in particular,” he said.

This “classic example” of the “new phenomenon
of convergence” is what Edge finds “dangerous”
to democracy.

“One company owns so much of the news media that they’re
able to set the political agenda and suppress news,”
he said. “It’s really quite scary.”

While the media doesn’t tell people what to think, they
can have great influence in what people think about, he said.

“It’s been proven over and over that media content
can set the agenda for public discussion, particularly election
issues,” he said.

The media can also influence policy through the “cultivation
theory,” which deals with violence in the media. Research
has found that violence in the media doesn’t make people
more violent, as once thought, but instead makes people more
fearful of violence.

“This has great, profound political implications because
it has been found that people who watch more television tend
to see the world the way it’s portrayed on TV. It’s
called a ‘mean world syndrome,’” Edge said.
“People who watch more violent TV content are more likely
to accept repressive political measures designed to protect
them from criminals and terrorists, and they tend to be more
willing to abrogate civil liberties.”

Not simply theory, the “culture of fear” has been
proven in what Edge calls the “Fox Effect,” in
which reports such as those on the Fox News Network continually
focus on terror and “slanting the news a certain way.”

After Sept. 11, 2001, Fox covered the war on terror in a very
jingoistic, patriotic manner, and it proved very popular with
Americans, Edge said.

“CNN was available in many more millions of households
than Fox News, and Fox beat them in the ratings,” he
said. “So in order to compete with Fox, the other networks
had to start doing the same sort of patriotic coverage with
a right wing slant.

“It was a very interesting study. Because Fox wasn’t
available in all cities, they were able to compare changes
in voting patterns in places where Fox was available and places
it wasn’t,” Edge said. “They found that
in places that it was available, the Republicans gained 3
to 8 percent of the vote.”

When the media is concentrated, as it is in Vancouver, the
influence can be enormous when both the television and newspaper
mediums are simultaneously pushing an agenda.

“Television is by far the most powerful medium, the
most pervasive medium, but newspapers are still the most influential
medium politically, so it helps to have both,” Edge
said. “You can control the images—and that’s
what politics is about—and the ideas are mostly discussed
on editorial and opinion pages.”

There is a lesson Americans should take from this and the
growing media reform movement in Canada, Edge said.

On Dec. 18, the Federal Communications Commission will vote
for a second time to lift the 1975 prohibition on cross-ownership
in America.

“There was a big fight a few years ago, in 2004 I guess
it was, when they lifted that prohibition briefly,”
he said. “There was such a storm of protest, Congress
stepped in and overturned the change.”

The Dec. 18 proposal includes lifting the prohibition in only
the 20th largest markets. Chicago, Dallas and New York are
among about a dozen cities in the U.S. where cross-ownerships
are currently allowed because they were established before
the 1975 prohibition.

“If they allow cross-ownership here, you’re going
to have the same thing happen as we’ve had in Canada,”
Edge said. “It’s been a bit of a disaster politically.”

While “you rarely see instances of ownership being as
politically active as we’ve seen with the Asper family
in Canada,” there are a myriad of influences that go
into news content, oftentimes in subtle ways, Edge said.

“I always tell my American friends if you want to see
the future of media, just look north because we now have major
news media convergence, which is what a lot of people would
like to see in this country. They’re trying to get the
FCC to remove the cross-ownership ban so that they can have
newspapers and television stations merge in cities across
the country,” he said. “My research has shown
that’s a bad idea because of the political power that
this gives media owners who have both newspapers and television
stations.”

“Asper Nation,” published by New Star Books, is
Edge’s third book. His other books include “Pacific
Press: The Unauthorized Story of Vancouver’s Newspaper
Monopoly” and “Red Line, Blue Line, Bottom Line,”
which discusses the economics of hockey.